Although the long sordid history of slavery has been researched,
chronicled, and vilified in America for decades, the story of
who the people were, where they came from, their ethnicities
and their gender has received far less attention, especially
in Africa: many of the people caught up in the slave trade were
mere numbers.

A new UConn history professor is working to bridge that gap.
Ugo Nwokeji, whose research interests turned to the slave trade
while he was studying at the University of Toronto, is helping
compile a database of more than 80,000 Africans who were rescued
from a life of slavery when the ships carrying them to America
were diverted by the British Navy to foreign ports and the people
taken to British Admiralty Courts and Mixed Commission Courts,
in the years after the English parliament banned slavery.

"We know quite a bit about the Atlantic slave trade - the names
of the boats, the captains, their crews - but we know so little
about the captives themselves," says Nwokeji. "The information
we have on the individuals forced into the slave trade is very
hazy."

And, although 80,000 names is only a fraction of the estimated
12-15 million Africans sold as slaves, learning who they were
and where they were from will help researchers as they continue
to sort out what happened in the 1700s and 1800s, Nwokeji says.

"This work is important first because it helps us understand
the Atlantic slave trade itself, and because it helps us gain
a better background on the African Diaspora," he says. The work
also provides a window to the hinterland of precolonial Africa,
about which historians know little due to the paucity of written
information.

Nwokeji, who comes from Nigeria, began teaching at UConn in
September. He earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto
and now holds a joint appointment with the Department of History
and the Institute for African American Studies. He is also a
research associate at the DuBois Institute for Afro-American
Research at Harvard University, where the database is being
built.

This semester, he is teaching a freshman course in global history,
and an upper level special topics course on the slave trade,
the largest forced migration in history. Nwokeji hopes the course
will give students a framework for understanding the modern
Atlantic world. He also will expose them to recent trends in
the relevant research, including issues such as ethnicity, culture
formation and gender.

The gender issue in the slave trade - why so many women left
from ports in the Bight of Biafra - says Nwokeji, is one of
the pieces that piqued his interest in the topic.

Several explanations have been offered in explaining why only
one in three Africans sent into slavery in the Americas was
female. The explanations rest on the female-oriented trans-Saharan
slave trade into North Africa, the middle East, and Asia, and
on the purported inclination of indiginous slave holders to
prefer females. These pressures are said to have ensured that
fewer women were available for the Atlantic market.

More recently, some scholars have argued that the proximity
to the ports from which captives were sent to the Americas was
critical, and that only a few women and children were able to
make the long march to the coast from distant regions.

Nwokeji says, however, that the transportation theory has not
taken into account that proximity to the coast did not have
the same impact in different regions: in the Bight of Biafra,
a much higher proportion of women were sent into Atlantic slavery,
while in West-Central Africa, where captives were also drawn
from areas close to the coast, there were a higher proportion
of children.

Nwokeji also downplays the transportation theory because the
Aro, a diverse group of ethnic Africans and the prime traders
in Africa, felt no compunction about marching slaves hundreds
of miles to get them to the port that could effect the fastest
turnaround.

Nwokeji now is focusing on the ethnicities of the people on
boats intercepted by the British navy, who were required to
register by courts, created by the British, when they landed.
Those papers, held by the British Public Records Office, should
go a long way toward helping Nwokeji and other researchers better
understand the big questions - why and how people were enslaved
- and toward giving identities to the people victimized by the
slave trade.